#there's 4 of us and it's a tie

[egophiliac]

I'm trying to avoid getting spoiled so I haven't looked up what's happening in the Jp server's main story, but for my own sanity I need to ask; is the story at a point where we know whether Lilia will get better/survive his almost-empty magic reserves..? Was it a true death flag from the start or only a plot device for malleus' overblot....?

not yet! I do think they're going to get back to it eventually, but -- keeping it as low spoilers as possible -- there's been...let's just say a LOT going on in the meantime.

enjoy 7-6!!! :)

[holocene-sims]

🍂 local man pictured in cool outfit 🍂

alternate caption: slapped a silly lil bow tie on the new trench coat mesh today

[handweavers]

if anyone's wondering, this is what my weaving patterns look like when i'm designing for overshot weaving lol

[beachyserasims]

In this house, a little girl hunts diligently for every and any shoelace she can find, stringing them together along the knobs of her closet door. The will of this child has sealed it shut so that this closet will never be opened again. What stays inside, remains... unseen.

Start / Next

[flythesail]

I mean, what was the takeaway from Cassian's arc? What does rebel in-fighting have to do with him?

[starfacedstudio]

ID: A lineup of some original characters drawn as Among Us beans. They have been stylized to have differing body types and they have tails instead of backpacks. Some sketches appear showing who in the group would be an 'impostor' by showing their spiky mouths. End ID.

not necessarily hard to find info but did you know the majority of the main cast of Visible Spectrum genuinely used to be among us characters. Yea. anyways (re-beans them)

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[darklight-owl]

Hey man. Can you watch her I need to go run some errands. Make sure she doesn’t get into trouble. Thanks.

[almoststedytimetravel]

It's honestly so fucking funny how dead Trinity Soul is. Almost every single piece of Persona media released since has been dedicated to making that poor twink noncannonical.

[josephtrohman]

i was so overcome with emotion today i cried my eyes out in a parking lot before hitting the highway, but not even because i feel sad…like im sure the sadness will hit me later that it’s over and 2ourdust in general is Over, but that was probably the happiest cry i’ve ever had in my fucking life about how fall out boy even remembered what somerset went through and CARED enough to make it up to us by giving us the most insane best show fucking ever last night ☹️❤️❤️❤️❤️ fall out boy forever and ever and ever and ever and ever if you even care

[holocene-sims]

💪💙🎵

[volt-reblogs-n-rambles]

I know the whole Persona 4 domain registration thing is DEFINITELY a remake but it'd be REALLY funny if we got a new Arena game instead.

[infiniteseriesofhalfways]

made scrunchies for my sister

[sourseat]

Update on not pulling my hair out: I found the tangle toy really really helpful and the only one of the four I tried that I liked. I went to a big toy store today to buy my own but they didn’t have any :( but I got a spinning metal cube which is weighty and I am enjoying a lot but I don’t think will do the thing the tangle toy does (occupy one hand in a variety of different motions with pulling while I am on my laptop). Cube video below

[fujouppy]

been really into this sandwich/burger lately: bottom bun, thin layer mayonnaise, mushed 1/3rd of a can of green peas, american cheese, 4 pieces of fried bacon, normal cheese, ham, american cheese, another layer of mayonnaise & top bun. i use hamburger buns for it cause i bought some when i made burgers for me & my mum and then didnt use them cause we had buns with cheese on top & they sounded better but im sure any other type of bun or maybe toast (or just regular boring bread if ur weird) would work too. also i put the hamburger buns on the grill pan w the bacon for a minute or two cause that makes them real niceys. i dont think anyone will try making this after reading this post as mushed canned green peas (they have to be canned peas) r a bit too avant garde for sandwichburgerthings but i wanted to share this w the world anyway